A Study Found That Disney Princess Movies Are More Sexist Than You Thought

Ariel wasn't the only one who lost her voice.

By now, you've probably picked out a few problematic issues when it comes to Disney movies. Sure, the princess gowns were fun to imagine twirling around in and we're always going to have a soft spot for that "happily ever after" ending. But all of that focus on finding a prince to whisk you away and save you from your problems? Yawn.

Thankfully, a number of Disney films like Brave and Mulan are fighting that trope, but there's still another issue at hand. Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer studied the dialogue and lines in each of the Disney princess movies, and they found something troubling: namely, that almost all of the princesses had fewer lines than the male characters in their films.

In fact, even Frozen, which was released the most recently and features two central princesses instead of one, came out worse for the wear. Male characters — including lovable, melting Olaf — took up 59% of the speaking roles. And The Little Mermaid, a film in which the princess literally loses her voice and can't contribute to the dialogue for most of the film, still featured more female speaking roles than Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Mulan. (Yep, even the girl who literally saved China was worse for the wear here.)

So why the imbalance? "My best guess is that it's carelessness," Eisenhauer, a grad student at North Carolina State told the Washington Post, "because we're so trained to think that male is the norm. So when you want to add a shopkeeper, that shopkeeper is a man. Or you add a guard, that guard is a man. I think that's just really ingrained in our culture.”

Brave,Tangled,Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella all featured 50% or more lines that came from female roles, so hitting an equal ratio is possible. And who'd have thought that it would happen in the '50s, when two of those iconic princess movies first debuted?

We're sure Disney didn't mean to give men all of the good lines on purpose — and a number of the princesses in these films were still the heroines of the entire film. (Psh, like you thought General Chang saved the empire. It was all Mulan, baby.) Here's hoping they right the ratio in the upcoming Moana...and until then, may we suggest a gender-neutral re-write of this classic tune?